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User blog:Adhamid2/Revision: "Sound Rhetorics: Recitative"
Out of the several pieces comprising Harlot of the Art's Special Issue on Sonic Rhetorics, I read Andrew Vogel's Recitative: The Persuasive Tenor of Jazz Culture in Langston Hughes, Billy Strayhorn, and John Coltrane. The piece was impressive, to say the least, as it was a carefully constructed webpage detailing the story that Jazz tells, focusing on the work of pivotal members in Jazz's history. The page is broken up into eight segments, embedded in a stack of eight musical bars. Playing on the theme of sheet music, each segment is named by a key component of contemporary song structure such as "Solo" or "Chorus" or "Bridge". For instance, the fourth segment is labeled, "Chorus: Persuasive Sound". The goal of Vogel's piece is to deliver the heart of Jazz by engaging readers in a discussion of its history and by evaluating notable poetry and music associated with the movement, all while providing the reader with clips of music to listen to. The setup was remarkably innovative, putting the Soundcloud or Youtube clips directly beneath the segment's header, as to prompt the reader to play the clip as he or she begins reading. Each clip was very purposefully chosen, the audio serving to accompany whatever text follows. The piece starts with "Head: Jazz Culture," which is a summary of the Jazz movement and how it lost its footing in American audiences, narrated by a Soundcloud file of Vogel's voice. The text is verbatim what he says. This setup was incredibly effective in the same way that audio tapes of books are effective. By listening to the author read aloud his or her own words, at the intended pace and in the intended tone, the meaning behind the words come alive. The point he tries to argue is ever more lucid as I read along to his speaking. Three of the eight segments adopt this technique, where the audio exactly matches the text. The other five segments explore specific works of art by Langston Hughes, primarily, and to a lesser extent, Billy Strayhorn and John Coltrane. Here Vogel still provides audio clips at the top, clips of music and poetry of the artist in exploration. In "Solo: Langston Hughes" Vogel discusses Hughes' "Jazz as Communcation" and " The Weary Blues". We, as listeners and readers, get to listen to Hughes' poetry while reading an evaluation of it. Not only am I taking in the unfiltered work itself, I am simultaneously engaged in reflecting on it, based on Vogel's visions. This is perhaps the most effective way to learn the history of a musical composition, by playing it and reading about it simultaneously. For visual art, this is simply not possible in exactly the same way. Since your eyes do the reading and percieve the visuals, you cannot be focused on both at the same time. Even in picture books, reading and observing are done separately, despite how effortless and quick the process of consuming picture books may be. It is all too clear how much love Vogel has for Jazz and its history. His appreciation for the movement shows in every detail of this page. His vocal enthusiasm, the website's visual intricacy, typesetting, and textual body all seem very well assembled. By the end his argument stands clear: Jazz is under-appreciated as a movement and culture, and people don't recognize how it echoes the wider progressive movement and has provided a foundation for current artforms. I have learned how flexibly sound can be used in a multimedia like this one. Instead of taking in content through one channel at a time, Vogel has found a way to make it easy for readers to receive sound and text at once, without doing anything that innovative. And its not like the text is easy to absorb either. It is deeply analytical, factual, and requires reflection, so you might think the reader's attention must be divided between sound and text. This is not true, as the music or audio is always chosen to match the text's content. Again, Vogel has done something truly commendable here. Category:Blog posts